The author of five prize-winning books of poetry, including The RoyalBaker’s Daughter (winner of the Felix Pollak Poetry Award), my most recent book is Kingdom of Speculation. I have received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as awards in translation, fiction and speechwriting. I am Series Editor of the Word Works’ International Editions, my latest selection being Handful of Salt, translations of the Kurdish poet Kajal Ahmad. Please visit my website, www.barbaragoldberg.net.

​​Star

It was a silver star with the word liar stamped on it and my father made me wear it because I was one. He knew I hadn’t taken my bath, just turned the faucets on, knew my scrapbook on Brazil was overdue (two pictures of the Amazon pasted on the cover). Spinning stories to wriggle out of things made him madder, one deceit compounding another, especially since my father was a man of his word and his word was gold. I was gladwhen he died and could let Danny feel me up

with no one the wiser, glad he didn’t see me run through his money like a woman bent on ruination. If only he could have lied a little, he who had so little charm, so little social grace. But for him truth was absolute, was never grey. As for me, there are so many truths it’s hard to tell the one big one that underlies them all: I loved my father, love him even more todaythough he was mean and cut me down to size and I was small to begin with. He left me bareof subterfuge without a leg to stand on but my own.

-from Royal Baker’s Daughter

Far-Flung

Honeybees and frogs are fast disappearing. Whatwill become of little green apples, the lonelinessof lilypads? Some species of moths no longer pollinateArizonan yuccas. Askance, askew, something isamiss. A tsunami one hundred feet high washes awaythree thousand souls in Papua New Guinea. It’s hardto know when disasters are natural. Once I was stungby a bee and my arm swelled like a melon. In collegea date slipped a frog down my blouse and I couldn’tstop screaming, those frantic hind legs. In high schoolI pithed a toad. Later I saw a half-carved cadaver, head and feet wrapped in soaked cloth, the yellow jelly wecall fat. The leaner they are, the harder to cut. Blandings’turtles don’t deteriorate with age. Our brain is the sizeof two clenched fists. The hand is the most complicatedof organs. Which, as is written on a card I carryin my wallet, I will donate to others — eyes, liver, lungs,heart, whatever can be salvaged, should all else fail.

-from Royal Baker’s Daughter

​The Highway of Bones

Under no stars on the highway of bones, the princess broods

on her losses: the King is dead,the Queen is dead, her beloved

nursemaid Gertruda demented, she who spun fanciful tales of dwarfs

with spurs on their boots. FarewellGertruda. Thus intent, the princess

trips on a femur, falls, cracks openher head. Demons appear to snatch

that part of her soul called memoria.Out flies the King, the Queen, Gertruda,

and everything she ever knew, that oneand one makes two, that two from two

is naught. And there she might lietill this very day had her shadow not

lassoed the demons with a skeinof dreams, thus releasing memoria

which recomposed in the princess's skull,who awoke, remembered, refreshed.